The Transaction Workflow Innovation Standards Team (TWIST) was set up to close the gaps in the physical and financial supply chain. Their main focus has been on driving the development of global Bank Service Billing (BSB) Codes. Paul Burstein, a leading member of the TWIST community, gave a progress report at the recent Eurofinance meeting in Miami. His report provided important data and thoughts.

Bank Providers
The BSB, Bank Services Billing standard is the International standard for banks to report Bank Service Charges, in XML format and has been developed by TWIST. It is supported by large global and regional banks and can be processed by commercially available software. The first bank to live with BSB was in September 2007, as of November 2011, there were 11 banks live with a BSB reporting service:

• Danske Bank (9 Countries)
• Barclays Bank (Sterling Accounts)
• Societe Generale (France)
• Citi (Western Europe, Asia & North America)
• JPMorgan Chase (Global)
• BNP Paribas (France, UK & Portugal)
• Deutsche Bank (10 Countries in Western Europe)
• Standard Chartered (11 Markets in Asia, Middle East & Africa)
• HSBC (Canada)
• Bank of America (Europe, Asia, Canada & Latin America)
• SEB (Nordics)

and two banks have limited release of BSB plus there are at least four banks developing BSB based services including Intesa SanPaolo and Unicredit.

Corporate Usage
There are some 40 Corporates receiving the BSB reports – about 20 in the US and 20 in Europe. These include: GE, Boeing, Lufthansa, Siemens and Deutschepost.

Corporate and Bank Software Providers
Paul listed the leading providers of BSB based software:

• corporate Software Providers:
  • BRMEdge™ (Weiland Financial Group aka Open Solutions)
  • Smart Analysis 6.0 (Chesapeake Systems Solutions)
  • Treasury Information Platform (Schwabe, Ley & Greiner)
• bank Software Providers:
  • Weiland Financial Group's BXB (Bank Xtensible Billing) system prepares and distributes BSB and 822 statements
  • TriSyn Group's Infopoint Account Analysis Statement Repository
  • SunTec's standard data interfacing platform.

What's Next
Paul described the overlap of their work with the development of the AFP Global Service Codes and how the TWIST BSB version 3.1 has been recast as the ISO 20022 camt.086 message standard by a team from SWIFT and TWIST. (N.B. Functionally the camt.086 is exactly they same as the 3.1, but is structurally very different to conform to ISO 20022.) The final version of the documentation will be published on the ISO 20022 web site by the end of June.

To adopt camt.086 he felt that:

• banks need to reprogram BSB to camt.086
  • new banks will probably only need to program for camt.086
  • existing banks will probably add camt.086 to 3.1 offering
• corporate vendor software needs to be upgraded to process camt.086
  • expect they will handle both 3.1 and camt.086
  • impact on corporates should be minor – software handles differences
  • documentation will include a mapping to convert 3.1 to camt.086.

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BSB codes and AFP Global Service codes are making real progress. Relatively soon all the leading cash management banks will use camt.086 standards in their bank statement reporting because if they don't they will loose business.